Found screen_ai in default folder

BLESMOLS

I'm very casually tech savvy. I can look things up and fix my digital world when it breaks, for the most part. However, I found something called screen_ai in my default folder while I was backing it up. I tried to find out if screen_ai is something I need to worry about and all I'm finding is a lot of jargon I don't understand and don't have years to learn. I know Vivaldi is built on a Chrome build (I'm about 80% sure), so if this is just randomly included crap from Google, well, because Google. I'm happy with Vivaldi because it doesn't include AI as far as I can tell.

Can someone who knows what it is and can speak to me like I'm three years old explain this inclusion to me and what screen_ai is? I'd be extremely grateful. Thank you in advance.

Hadden89

@BLESMOLS it seems related to text manipulation, but as google services are not enabled might be kept for compatibility reasons only (so no connections so far)

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/tags/127.0.6517.1/services/screen_ai/

Catweazle

@BLESMOLSm, Andi give this answer

To remove Chrome's Screen AI feature:

Find the Screen AI folder in your browser's data directory:

Linux: ~/.config/chromium/screen_ai or ~/.config/google-chrome/screen_ai

Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\screen_ai

Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Google Chrome/screen_ai

Delete the entire screen_ai folder and its contents, including libchromescreenai.so (Linux), chrome_screen_ai.dll (Windows), or equivalent[^3].

Disable Screen AI features in Chrome flags:

Go to chrome://flags

Search for and disable:

"Media App PDF A11y via OCR"

"Enable OCR for local image search"

"Performs OCR on inaccessible PDFs"[^18]

Restart Chrome for changes to take effect.

Screen AI is a machine learning feature that provides accessibility functions like OCR for PDFs and main content extraction for reading mode[^4]. While it processes data locally without network access[^4], the component can consume significant system resources - reducing battery life from 9 hours to less than one hour in some cases[^18].

[^3]: Tom's Hardware - How to block Google's annoying AI overviews and just get search results

[^4]: Google Groups - What does screen_ai do?

[^18]: Pivot to AI - Google ScreenAI: make your Chromebook melt down

BLESMOLS

@Hadden89 Thank you! I'm sorry for the late reply. This resource should help me a lot.

BLESMOLS

@Catweazle Thank you! I should be able to follow this easily.

I also wanted to come back and edit this post. I looked up Andi through your link and it's an AI! Thank you for navigating it for me to find an answer.